


Totentanz

by fightingtheblankpage



Series: upon the subject of - drabbles [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Hale House, Mentions of Death - well duh, ghost fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 03:54:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingtheblankpage/pseuds/fightingtheblankpage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t true that the dead are always around. They're memories ‒ if you leave them alone for long enough, they will corrode like metal left in the backyard, in the rain. The dead can't remember themselves. Someone has to always be around, for the dead to see themselves reflected back in the living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Totentanz

**Author's Note:**

> As you may have noted, since the story takes place behind the veil, so to say, character death is a thing.  
> In other news, my thanks to Elizabeth for hanging out with the sleep-deprived me.

It isn’t true that the dead are always around. They're memories ‒ if you leave them alone for long enough, they will corrode like metal left in the backyard, in the rain. The dead can't remember themselves. Someone has to always be around, for the dead to see themselves reflected back in the living.

The dead don't haunt cemeteries, because truth being told, cemeteries are ultimately where people forget. Nobody is truly a date and a name on a tombstone, so how can a ghost find purchase in nothing but letters and stone? They don't even always haunt the same places where they spent most of their days. But there is a logic to it, in as much as there is logic to dying.

The dead can't remember themselves, but they have a way of knowing about things that happened, both during their lives and outside and beyond of them – not about people, maybe, or the big events, but the living are reflected back in the dead, too. The lines get blurry after a while. Those sudden bursts of knowing are sharp and unpleasant, and feel like a grounding electric shock. All of a sudden, a face appears, and it feels like the most important face you'll ever see. And then it's gone, and days go by, and they feel a lot like spider webs - clinging and dragging you back.

Laura used to see a face like that, but it's been a long time (She supposes; to talk about time to her is like for the living to talk about the 11-dimensions theory, only vaguely comprehensible at best) since then. She's not exactly alone, though sometimes she'd rather be. The others make her uneasy, and restless, because she thinks there may be something important to them, but she doesn't know.

They're too preoccupied with themselves, anyway.

When Laura is aware of herself, she likes to play a game. It's a little bit like standing between two mirrors and turning very fast around to see if maybe this time one of the reflections deep, deep in there will be too slow and you will catch it unaware. Laura catches herself unaware. She stands in the black corridor - she thinks there must've been a fire, but she can never, ever see outside the windows, so sometimes she thinks it may be an underground mine just as well - and twirls around, really fast, so her long hair whip her across the cheek.

Sometimes she catches the house unaware.

It's not much - just a shadow of a person pausing in the doorway, or a cup dropped in the kitchen, or a name that slips her memory right after she hears it. When Laura tries to chase them, they disappear, so she doesn't. She plays her game, and then she drifts away for days (time-less, day-less periods, how does she call them?), and comes back, and tries again. She doesn't get bored, or discouraged. She doesn't get anything, for that matter.

Laura sees a woman in the house now. The woman could've been here for year-less years, maybe even playing the same game but at different moments, Laura doesn't know. She doesn't think so. The woman looks more concrete than Laura - like she just walked in from outside of the house, with her hair swept by the wind, her cheeks flushed from cold, and her eyes falsely teary because of the autumn air. She has a necklace around her neck, and it's red. It's the most beautiful colour Laura's seen in the house. The only colour.

The woman flickers and disappears, and Laura disappears, too. They don't meet for a long (maybe) time after that, but it doesn't matter much.

The woman takes worse to being dead than Laura. She screams sometimes, and even runs through walls, like it can do anything. The flush disappears from her cheeks, and the necklace, Laura learns, is blood. She still likes it very much. Red suits the other woman.

The rules may be that they're not supposed to talk to each other - how would Laura know, she's still learning, but she thinks she's taken to it all reasonably well - but truth being told, Laura can't remember many words, or at least not how to make them sound in the silence of the house. She's envious of the woman's screams. The dead, to no surprise, have really just death to think about, and the other woman's death seems much more interesting than Laura’s.

Still, they don’t talk about it. The concept of conversation is unattainable, but the dead can share the direction in which their consciousness wanders. It’s like a way of focusing attention on the same thing, and then echoing each other’s emotions about it until either they manage to fit them together, or something gives way and one of them disappears.

The blood-collared woman doesn’t share the same tranquillity Laura feels. She seems to be waiting for something, but Laura knows it won’t come. That’s the point of dying – things just stop happening to you.

The third woman, when she arrives in the house, notices Laura right away. It’s so strange it roots Laura to the spot, and makes her pause in the middle of her disappearing act. This woman is older, and sometimes her eyes flash angrily. Laura would like to tell her that she knows the feeling – she thinks she used to, once, the helpless frustration of trying to fit together puzzles that won’t cooperate.

The house gets colder – Laura can’t get cold, but she feels it clinging to her non-body, and it’s like snakes and spiders crawling over her – when the bright-eyed woman is there, so Laura tries to avoid her. The third woman is much, much calmer than the blood-collared one, but she still wants out. Laura isn’t sure she wants it, too. Out to where?

Sometimes the bright-eyed woman opens the door and walks out of them, and in the same instance she walks in through another door somewhere in the house. Without a pause, she does the same thing again, and again, and again. Laura watches her and suspects it may be the game the bright-eyed woman plays.

They rarely meet, the three of them, in one room and at the same time. The blood-collared woman looks through Laura, and the bright-eyed one looks at her with her mouth curled with a distaste that seems to perplex her at the same time.

But they’re all there, in the hallway, when the heavy body of the wrecking ball tears through the wall, smashes it to bits that go flying through their bodies as if they’re just wisps of mist. The ball caves the stairs in before it swings back the same way it came from, but Laura isn’t looking at it.

Laura is watching the jagged hole and the bright blue sky visible through it, and she can breathe, and she’s so very, very light. The house collapses around her, and Laura’s last thought is that whatever happens next, she won’t come back here. Something tells her that once set free from their common prison, the other two won’t follow her.

Something tells her she’s going to miss Kate and Victoria.

**Author's Note:**

> Totentanz means "dance of the dead". You can easily find it in Medieval art. The idea was, to make it simple, to show that everybody is equal in death.
> 
> If you want to talk or see what I'm up to, I'm on Tumblr (talktoyourcactus).
> 
> Love,  
> Monika.


End file.
